Is Bigger Always Better?!

At the start of June, YouTube introduced a new large ad on the YouTube.com home page. ‘Large’ is definitely the appropriate adjective here with a format of 960×250 pixels. Ads of the same size had begun to appear on other popular sites during May. To offer a frame of reference, for the average 1050 pixel high screen, this means that about a third of the usable screen height is the ad, making it difficult to miss. For example, we may not have heard of the PS3/X-Box game Modern Warfare 2 previously, but we certainly know about it now!

For the Modern Warfare 2 ad on YouTube, a video played in a central window, leaving lots of space to the left and right for additional information. These extra spaces were very significant. YouTube’s new large ad format makes the advertisement more content-focused as the centerpiece of the page and allows for supplemental advertising in the surrounding space.

On the Web, where advertisers are looking for innovative ways to grasp and maintain eyeballs, premium video content delivers increased stickiness. In the Modern Warfare 2 advertisement, the name was visible to the side of the video the entire time: this repetition ensures that the viewer retains the name of the video game.

From a personalization and customization viewpoint, these extra areas around a video open up all sorts of possibilities in terms of allowing the user to influence what happens in the video. This could be anything from the conventional thumbnail views of other videos you might like to see, which YouTube is already known for, to more advanced, interactive options like setting preferences of length or topic.

Moving away from squashing everything into the video window can only be a good thing. These new large ad sites also avoid the problem of trying to fit lots of information into a narrow ’skin’ surround to a video window. Maybe bigger is better.

Tags: Advertising, Context, Video, YouTube
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